Mark, I can't see any statement like that in Birds of my Kalam Country. Here's the paragraph about Black Kites (square brackets in the original; the /n/ of anmt is a velar nasal that I can't reproduce here):

    "Anmt or kob-bg-ket [the Black Kite, Milvus migrans] is another bird which hunts in the open country and the gardens, taking rats and snakes and worms from the ground. It is dark brown, partly black on the under-surface of its wings. I can't translate anmt, but kob-bg-ket means 'it haunts the burnt-off grassland'. When large areas of grass are burnt, this bird sometimes appears and catches small animals as they try to escape from the fire, and picks up dead creatures that the fire has left." (Majnep and Bulmer 1977: 144)

That's all there is in the text about the behaviour of Black Kites (and nothing like it in descriptions of other raptors, not that I can see with a quick scan).

Martin


--- In Ethnoornithology@ yahoogroups. co.uk, Mark Bonta <markabonta@. ..> wrote:
>
> I saw a ref online to Birds of My Kalem Country, where the kite was linked to fire not only because it swooped around active burns, but also the way it moved its legs/talons appeared like the movements humans start to make fire. Can you check that (I don't have access to the book)?
>
> mb
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